Public Spaces, Parks and Democratic Transition: A Case Study of Republican China

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This thesis has two related objectives. First, it proposes a general critique of the way in which liberal theorists have understood the democratisation process—particularly in their search for its nascent forms in the late Qing Dynasty and early Republican China. In this sense, it is a work of political philosophy and aims to counter poorly formulated criticisms of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This is not to condone everything the CCP does, but rather to highlight the frequent misperceptions of key concepts employed by their international interlocutors—especially freedom, democracy and government. The core of the argument rests on Dankwart Rustow’s three stage “matrix” which suggests that those factors that bring a democracy into being are not necessarily the same as those that sustain it. The argument, here, is that certain types of government have a role to play in the democratisation process. This problematises the generally-accepted view that the role of government (any government) is to remove itself from this process altogether. This is evidenced by the long standing liberal “truth” of the necessity of the public/private divide.
Second, the thesis outlines a history of the first indigenous Chinese public park—Zhongyuan Gongyuan (Central Park). In this sense, the thesis is also a work of history. The park, itself, is significant because, unlike the west, there has not been a history of formalised public spaces in Chinese history—like the agora, forum or piazzas. The establishment of the park, therefore, highlights a considerable, albeit geographically localised, watershed in the objectives of Chinese government. Previous governments kept their gaze towards heaven; early Republican governments reversed the direction, and looked towards the people. The newly established municipal authorities clearly saw the health, morality and conduct of the masses as the raison d’être of the park; the aim was new citizens who would contribute to the political modernity and capitalism that would make China strong. To build a new China required a dramatic rethinking of what the citizen would look like, and the earlier intellectual reconfigurations—especially those of Liang Qichao’s xin min—found their material expression, at least partially, in the ways in which the patrons consumed these new public spaces like Zhongyuan Gongyuan. The story of the park, then, provides a case study that demonstrates that government, at least in Republican China, did play a role in the creation of some of the basic elements of democracy—for example, civil society, modern citizenship and the public sphere.